Among
documents collected by David Irving for his
libel action against GITTA SERENY is her letter
to The Times, November 16, 1996

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Plaintiff's Discovery

1825

November 16, 1996

From Ms Gitta Sereny

Sir, The impression given by Professor Richard
Breitman's remarks, as quoted, in your report, is
misleading. Presenting already well-known historical facts
as new discoveries tends to diminish their substance and
even to misrepresent them.

The murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews in Russia in
1941, well before the establishment of extermination camps,
and the fact that many of the first killings were carried
out by the German Ordnungspolizei, have been amply described
in Those Were The Days and God With Us by
Klee, Dressen and Riess (1988, 1992), in Ordinary Men
by Christopher
Browning (l992) in my own Albert Speer, His Battle
With Truth (1995) and, however critical I was in my
review (March 28, 1996), in Hitler's Willing
Executioners by Daniel
Goldhagen.

The East European murders, ordered by Hitler and
carried out during the last six months of 1941, included not
"only" about half a million Russian Jews, but many tens of
thousands of non-Jewish Russian civilians -- the political
and cultural elite of dozens of conquered cities.

They also included most of the Jews (250,000 in Lithuania
alone) and countless non-Jews in the three Baltic republics
and Poland. It is true that many of these actions were
originally carried out by native National Guards and later
by the Ordnungspolizei. However, these organisations were
under the control and command of the SS, and all their
reports were signed by SS officers.

These murders have long been a matter of historical fact.
It is still unclear when they were first recognised as being
the start of the genocide of all European Jewry and of the
systematic elimination of Eastern Europe's social, religious
and cultural elite. The truth about British knowledge of
these matters will not be found in German or Russian
documents, but in Britain where it is as yet carefully
hidden away.